During my daily trawl of the technology, lifestyle and fashion pages of the online newspapers, I worringly came across an article in today’s Daily Mail Science and Technology section with the headline “Noel Edmonds launches ‘cosmic ordering’ app for iPhone users to call on the universe for help.”

Surely, no rational person would believe an iPhone app has any kind of spiritual or religious power and even more worringly, the brainbox behind the idea is Noel Edmonds, famed for catapulting Mr Blobby onto UK Television screens, say no more!

How often have you gone ahead and purchased a game for your iPhone, only to discover it wasn’t what you expected? The only way to avoid this in future, is to be better informed about an application, before you part with your cash – right?

App Theatre

The App Theater is an amateur video sharing website in YouTube style, dedicated to referring and promoting applications and games amongst iPhone and iPod users. A kind of show and tell, where you get to visually test drive before you buy.

Parallel to the increasing number of applications, a community of users and developer groups is steadily growing, with members encouraged to rate and comment on each other’s videos. And with everything available to buy direct via the App Store, you’re guaranteed never to be disappointed again!

Those of you who like to mix a drink to pass the time may have heard of DiffordsGuide, a popular cocktail mailing list. These people have brought out “Cocktails Made Easy”, a new book which now has a companion iPhone App unsurprisingly titled Cocktails Made Easy.

What is surprising is that Cocktails Made Easy is quite fully featured, sporting 530 cocktail recipes that use only 14 different ingredients. Every one of these recipes has a photograph accompanying it, and the ability to note and rate them. You can search through cocktails by what ingredients they contains, their rating, or by name.

If you only have a few ingredients at hand, you can also personalise the app by customising an on-screen “cocktail cabinet” which uses Delicious Library-esque presentation to show what drinks you have at hand, and what drinks you can make with them.

Certain details, like the ability to shake the iPhone to bring up a random cocktail, or the provided ratings and comments from the alluded to Mr. Difford make this a pretty good purchase for mixers and their drinkers alike. To top it off, it all works offline.

The people from Difford’s Guide encourage you to enjoy your cocktails responsibly, however. Quite.